Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The Bed Sitting Room (1969) With Peter Cook And Dudley Moore

Equal parts sentimental and surreal, absurd and moral, 1969's The Bed Sitting Room from director Richard Lester is a sort of weird masterpiece. Given the nearly plot-free nature of the film, and the setting of a landscape of rubbish in the aftermath of World War 3, the film is hard to embrace.

However, it is a product of its time and, as such, probably required viewing for fans of 1960s British cinema.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are police officers scouring the British countryside outside London in their balloon-powered flying police car.

Arthur Lowe, from TV hit "Dad's Army" and cinema's No Sex Please, We're British (1973), leads his family from the safety of their home in an abandoned London Tube car to the decimated landscape around London. Daughter Rita Tushingham is pregnant but still fancied by lad Richard Warwick, while mother Mona Washbourne seems to be unduly optimistic and possibly oblivious to the destruction around her.

After being treated by nurse Marty Feldman, Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson) wanders Lear-like across the landscape in search of medical assistance as he seems to think he's about to turn into the bed sitting room of the title.

Michael Hordern meets various strangers in the post-nuclear war landscape, including everyman Spike Milligan and the BBC (Frank Thornton): a guy who pops up inside abandoned television set casings.

The film seems to hit its absurdist peak when Mona Washbourne, who has turned into chest of drawers, is placed inside the bed sitting room of the title, that bed sitting room really the former Lord Fortnum who has somehow morphed due to the radiation.

I can't say that I entirely enjoyed The Bed Sitting Room (1969) -- maybe I was expecting something closer to Bedazzled (1967)? -- but as a film fan I am grateful that it's now available on DVD.

The BFI DVD is typically superb, with the film presented in a very clean anamorphic print. The extras include a total of 90 minutes of 3 interview segments from 1967 with Richard Lester, Spike Milligan, and Peter Cook.

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About Me

I write about stuff I like.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1967, I spent most of my life in Maryland before I moved to Hong Kong at the very end of 2011. I worked in Kowloon, and lived on Lamma Island, for nearly 3 years, and then I moved back to Maryland with my wife at the end of August 2014. When I was younger, I worked in 3 record stores in College Park, Maryland, from 1987 to 1990 and those jobs gave me a lot of joy, as well as a musical education. I was once a huge fan of the cinema of Hong Kong, especially Shaw Brothers titles. An Anglophile, I still gravitate to British films and music. My youth was spent on Marvel comics, and Starlog and Famous Monsters magazines; Universal and Hammer horror movies; the work of Ray Harryhausen; classic American films of the 1930s; Hanna-Barbera cartoons; music from the glory days of American AM radio; lousy TV reruns; Mego toys; and Godzilla flicks...